Why it matters when, exactly, Romney left Bain

It was easy to miss, but there was an interesting spat last week between President Obama's campaign and the Annenberg Center's FactCheck.org. The campaign had run an ad holding Mitt Romney responsible for a series of Bain Capital layoffs, which FactCheck.org rejected as unfair -- the layoffs, the website's editors said, occurred after Romney left Bain.

Obama's team stood by the claim, sending a six-page letter (pdf) to the FactCheck.org editors, defending their argument in great detail. FactCheck.org was unmoved and said the campaign's claim was still wrong -- any business decisions Bain made after February 1999, when Romney stopped working at his private equity firm, can't fairly be held against him. . .

Mother Jones' David Corn has done some excellent reporting of late, uncovering ample evidence that Romney didn't leave Bain until 2002, three years after his ostensible departure date. Josh Marshall moved the ball forward yesterday, as well.

The gist of the disagreement comes down to this: There's no question that numerous public filings and some contemporaneous press references say Romney was still running things at Bain after 1999. But his campaign insists that whatever securities filings may have said, in practice, he was so busy running the 2002 Winter Olympics that he actually had no role at Bain after early 1999. That's possible in theory. But there's no evidence for it besides self-interested claims by Romney. And there's plenty of documentary evidence to the contrary. After all, what you tell the SEC is really supposed to be true. >>>

1. The Fact-Checkers, Ma'am, Are Full To the Brim With Barnyard Effluent Here

The filings are documents of law, and determinative.

In any case, a man who profits is responsible for what he profits from, and R-Money certainly profited, and extremely well, from these actions aimed at harming American working people to line his already over-stuffed pockets.